Day Trip Creator for Your Family

This is an app I am currently designing and building with a friend of mine. The idea came from my own personal family needs, and a realization that there simply is not an app that is able to cater to specific needs of different types of families. Specifically, as it pertains to valuable, time saving family event planning.

This page should clarify the rationale and design thinking behind the app. It will likely change as we test our assumptions through user testing along the way, as we get closer to finishing it. I'm also generating a lot of this work via waterfall methodologies which goes against my sensibilities a little, but I wanted to get the product further along as to test my design as early as possible.

Discovery phases and assumptions

Family size and structure is one of the main criteria of search for Day Out. Having the ability to gather points of data concerning age groups, mashed-up with difficulty levels for activities, such as those posted by the National Parks services, is crucial to begin to draw conclusions on what types of events are best suited for various family types.

Figuring out a solution to how a user could get results for events and activities that might change throughout the day was also tricky. Most apps make the assumption that you are looking for single events with a single purpose in mind. Most do not give very good information on what to expect once you arrive, let alone give suggestions on how to prepare for it.

We needed an app that deals with single day agendas and itineraries, specifically for families on different types of budgets and accessibility needs.

In-page Filtering is the Key

Creating an 'always-on' filtering system was key to the idea of having immediate feedback while zeroing-in on exactly what your family's needs for your trip might be. This means that web-service data needs to be pulled into the app at activation and be always available to the user

while associated with saved user data and their profile information.

By doing this, we can create a very simple user interface that essentially rates your activities for you as you build a daily itinerary, which can be crowd-sourced as it's saved and made available to other users.